Salient features of Keats' poetry

Romanticism primarily was a revolt against the artificial, pseudo-classical poetry in 18th
Century. Wordsworth was the founder of this movement. Romantic poets can be divided into
two groups – Old Romantics and Young Romantics. In old Romantics there are Wordsworth,
Coleridge and Scott. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott belong to Early Romantics, whereas
Keats, Shelley, and Byron constitute the Later Romantics. Among all the Romantics, Keats
was the last to born and first to die. But quite surprisingly he achieved in 26 years what other
could not get ever the whole of their life. Keats is also said to be the most romantic of all the
romantics. He was greatly inspired by Greek art, culture and mythology. He was also inspired
by Elizabethan poets especially Spenser.

Keats is a pure romantic poet. He writes poetry for the sake of poetry. He believes in art for
art’s sake. He does not write poetry for any palpable design or any propaganda. His major
concern is to give pleasure. It means that his chief concern is pleasure. Whereas some other
romantics have been writing poetry for the propagation of their objectives as Wordsworth and
Shelley were in the favour of French Revolution. But Keats is least concern with the social
issues of life.

Love for nature is the chief characteristic of all he romantics. Keats also loves nature but he
loves nature for the sake of nature. He does not give any theory or ideology about nature. He
only admires the beauty of nature. But on the other hand, Wordsworth spiritualizes nature,
Coleridge finds some supernatural elements in nature, Shelley intellectualizes nature and
Byron is interested in the vigorous aspects of nature.

Keats was a pure poet as he does not project any theory in his poetry. Keats believes in
Negative Capability – the capability of being impersonal. Keats does not involve his personal
feelings in his poetry. He writes poetry only for pleasure but Shelley lacks Negative
Capability. Shelley lends his personal sorrow and feeling in his poetry. He could not be
impersonal and writes about his feelings and sorrows.

Keats is a sensuous poet. It means that he writes his poetry with his penta senses. We not only
enjoy his poetry rather we can taste, touch, see and hear all the ideas presented in his poetry.
We enjoy his poetry with all our penta sense. The whole of our body is involved in his poetry
when we read him. Keats’ imagery is static and concrete whereas Shelley’s imagery is
dynamic and abstract. Keats’ imagery shows the calmness of Keats’ mind whereas Shelley’s
poetry shows his neurotic and confusing attitude.

Keats was also Hellenistic like all romantics. He was inspired by Hellenism. Hellenism was
the soul of his poetry. There are many Hellenistic features in his poetry such as his Greek
instinct, his love for Greek literature, his love with Greek sculpture and art, his Greek
temperament, his love for beauty and the touch of fatalism and tragedy. His attitude of
melancholy is also Hellenistic.
“Ode on Indolence” as a weaker ode (Keats)
“Ode on Indolence” is the weakest of all his poems because it lacks negative capability.
There is no logical sequence in its stanzas. There is repetition of the ideas of Keats’ previous
odes i.e. “Ode on Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Nightingale” and “Ode to Autumn”.

Keats wrote this poem in his weakest moments of life. One of his brothers died, other left
him. Besides, he was also suffering from inherited disease and on top of all his love Fanny
Browne deserted him. He was disappointed in his ambition to be famous, disappointed in
love and disappointed in his art of writing poetry and finally disappointed with life. He seems
to be crying in helplessness. Instead of self-control, he depicted self-pity.

The poet is in a mood of perfect indolence. Three figures happened to pass from his sight –
Love, Ambition and Poesy. At the third time, the poet is tempted by them and longs for them
but he thinks it his folly. At the fourth time, the three figures once again tempted him but now
the reality has dawned upon him. Therefore, he bid them adieu.

The poet is feeling asleep. He has lost all his faculties. Pain has ceased to be unpleasant and
pleasure has ceased to be pleasant to him. He has become very indifferent to these feelings.

Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower;

The very sleepy moment of falling asleep has captured him. His mind is sleeping but not his
senses. He is neither receptive nor productive. The only feelings he wants to have are no
feelings.

The poem is very much subjective and reflects the poet’s extreme hopelessness and
disappointment. He reaches the climax of emotions and wants to withdraw from Love,
Ambition and Poetry.

O folly! What is love? and where it is?

And for that poor Ambition! it springs
From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;
For Poesy! -- no -- she has not a joy.

When he wants to withdraw from emotions, he wants to withdraw from the world. When he
wants to withdraw from love, he wants to give up both lover and beloved. When he wants to
withdraw from poetry, he wants to give up all imagination. Now he is contended with his
“horrid indolence”.

In rest of his odes, there is element of negative capability. In Keats’ own words “Poetry
should be the outcome of the negative capability”. As in “Ode to Nightingale”, he negates
himself and wants to fly with the nightingale.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Similarly in “Ode on Grecian Urn” he escapes into the world of art and says:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Whereas in “Ode on Indolence”, he is wailing for his personal emotions and unable to
practice his own theory of negative capability.

This poem has repetition of earlier poems. When one’s creative faculties fail, one starts
repeating oneself. Same is true to Keats in this ode. He borrows ideas from earlier poems as
his genius has been exhausted.

Apart from this, the poem is not only weak with regard to content but also in the form. There
is not logical sequence in the stanzas. The poem is divided into three distinct parts: narrative,
descriptive and reflective. As in the first stanza, there is narrative quality.

One morn before me were three figures seen,

With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;

Then in the middle of the poem, there is descriptive quality.

The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;

The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
-----------------------------------------------
The last, whom o love more, the more of blame
-----------------------------------------------
I know to be my demon Poesy.

The last part of the poem has a reflective quality:

Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,

Into the clouds, and never more return!

The word ‘never’ reflects the determination that these three passions – Love, Ambition and
Poetry.

Keats’ odes have been changed with that they do not have any logical end as in “Ode on
Grecian Urn” and “Ode on Indolence”. But if we critically observe, to Keats the
understanding through intellect is partial understanding. He rejects all palpable designs. He
rejects all understanding and all logics and long for sensation.

“O! for a life of sensation rather than of thought”

On another occasion, he says:

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

But this poem has aesthetic continuity from first to last.

Above premises leads us to the conclusion that though poem has repetition earlier poems, it
lacks negative capability and logical sequences of stanzas yet it has a definite of aesthetic
feelings.

So, the ode on the whole is not a weak ode. It has its aesthetic merits.
Keats' Sensuousness
Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate
truth of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts.

Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching,
smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It
gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and coulourful word
pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the
sense of smell and so on.

Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere; and it is his senses that first
reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses.
Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the
great principle that:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’

Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward passion fro nature by giving his
whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty.

Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense
impressions are the starting point of poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that
excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense
impressions generate poetry.

The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth’s imagination is
stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature,
of the flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our
sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one
of his letters:

O for a life of sensation than of thoughts

He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight.

SENSE OF SIGHT: Keats is a painter of words. In a few words he presents a concrete and
solid picture of sensuous beauty.

“Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild.”

And in “Ode on Grecian Urn” again the sense of sight is active.

“O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;”

SENSE OF HEARING: The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet’s heart.
“The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days, by emperor and clown:”

In “Ode on Grecian Urn” he says:

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;”

SENSE OF TOUCH: The opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe extreme
cold:

“The sedge is withered from the lake

And no birds sing.”

SENSE OF TASTE: In “Ode to Nightingale”, Keats describes different kinds of wine and
the idea of their tastes in intoxication.

“O for a beaker full of the warm South

Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene,”

SENSE OF SMELL: In “Ode to Nightingale”, the poet can’t see the flowers in darkness.
There is mingled perfume of many flowers.

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”

Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is “Ode to Autumn”. In this ode the season
of autumn is described in sensuous terms in which all senses are called forth.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;”

For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to
the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of
sense. There is the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear.

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft.

Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses
are rich in sensuous quality – delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed
darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert
but he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery.

As time passes Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual passion. He
begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the “inheritor of
unfulfill’d renown”.

Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he passes from
sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes
sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism.
However the nucleus of Keats’ poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the
beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood.

Keats’ pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic
detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except
Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness.

Keats – Arts Versus Life

Keats, unlike other romantics, creates art for the sake of art. Life is an enigma and art makes
life understandable.

Art is imaginative reconstruction of life. Both are complementary as in the world of the Urn.
Engravings on the urn take him to the world of art and nightingale takes him into the world of
fancy. In art, there is permanence and coldness of life. It is a deadly permanence. The pictures
on the urn represent life but they lack life. In the world of reality, there is death, decay and
transience but there is also warmth of life. Art provides a window between reality and
imagination. It facilitates moments of reality and imagination.

Keats discovered the metaphor of Grecian Urn. After seeing, he was motivated to speculate
on the problems of life. He confronted the paradox of life and death, transience and
permanence, actual and ideal, stillness and action, desire and fulfillment. After all the study,
he reached the conclusion that:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

 The title of Grecian Urn is paradoxical. It is a symbol of life and death, urn is a pot in
which the ashes of the dead are kept. So it is a symbol of death. On the other hand, urn is
preserved in centuries. It has become immortal. It has led a life more than life. Hence it is a
symbol of life. So it resolves the paradox of life and death.

 “Unravish’d bride” is a paradox of permanence and transience.

 “Silence and slow time” is a paradox of time and timelessness.

 Sylvan historian – art has narrative quality

 Flowery tale – art has many stories about it and life.

 What leaf-fring’d legend – Art tickles the mind.

 What men or gods – art removes the distinction between mortal and immoral.

 What mad pursuit – art creates passion, ecstasy and excitement.

 Paradox between ideal and the real:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter;

In imagination there is no limit.

 Paradox of desire and fulfillment:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though wining near the goal – yet, do not grieve;

Art captures the life.

 There is no autumn engraved in the world of art.

Ah! happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

 Art eternalizes the passions and beauty but in real life both decline.

In the world of art, there is no deceit.

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.

 There is unending happiness in the world of art.

More happy love! More happy, happy love.

 Paradox of permanence and morality and unweariness.

And, happy melodist unwearied,

 There is newness and uniqueness in art

For ever piping songs for ever new.

 There is warmth and joy in art.

For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.

 In art, there are no tensions and worries.

A burning forehead, and parching tongue.

 There is mystery in art

O mysterious priest,

 Paradox of the universal and the particular

What little town by river or sea shore.

 Art has all signs of life except life.

With forest branches and the trodden weed:

 Art mimics life

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought.

 Art is profound.

When old age shall this Generation waste.

 Art is prophetic. It gives the message

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty
Truth sometimes means reality, while reality is usually not beautiful at all. Reality can be
disappointing or cruel or ugly. By choosing beauty to believe in as the total truth, we can
surpass the ugly part of reality the same way we surpass the fear of death by believing in
God. From here, we can even understand the poet's eagerness to make the living as happy as
possible in stanza 3, by repeating 6 times "happy". He is rather decided to see beauty, which
is connected with happiness and away from sorrow. He has made up his mind to choose
beauty as his only truth at that time (or even earlier). It is why he uses the urn's tone to make
his statement, as if the urn, a steady and still ancient thing, is saying that "why do not you
believe in me? This is all you need to know on earth."

If the "Ode to a Nightingale" portrays Keats's speaker's engagement with the fluid
expressiveness of music, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" portrays his attempt to engage with
the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries
to the time of the speaker's viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense--it does not
age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker's meditation, this
creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are
free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront
aging and death (their love is "for ever young"), but neither can they have experience (the
youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their
homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks
different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the "mad pursuit" and
wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: "What men or gods are these? What
maidens loth?" Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of
the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover
beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the
urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from
temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper's unheard song and the eternally
unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is "far above" all transient human
passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity--when
passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a "burning
forehead," and a "parching tongue." His recollection of these conditions seems to remind
the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify
with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they
were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the "little
town") and a destination (the "green altar"). But all he can think is that the town will forever
be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he
confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and
wheres of the "real story" in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the
destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to
engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt
identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and
thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the "little town" with a real
and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails
simply because there is nothing more to say--once the speaker confronts the silence and
eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at
least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to
engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its
ability to "tease" him "out of thought / As doth eternity." If human life is a succession of
"hungry generations," as the speaker suggests in "Nightingale," the urn is a separate and self-
contained world. It can be a "friend to man," as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the
kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to
human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind--
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the
Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no
one can say for sure who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all
ye need to know." It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn
addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his
awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of
beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple
and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge.
If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important
lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know
on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal
interpretation which reading to accept.
Keats' concept of beauty
Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate lover of
beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty constitutes his aestheticism.
Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman and in art.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is one of the
most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most passionate lover of the
world as the career of beautiful images and of many imaginative associations of an object or
word with a heightened emotional appeal. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the
incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. He
hated didacticism in poetry.

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

He believed that poetry should be unobtrusive. The poet, according to him, is a creator and an
artist, not a teacher or a prophet. In a letter to his brother he wrote:

“With a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration.”

He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social
reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as he said:

“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”

For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or experience.
He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the realm of imagination.
Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained untouched by revolutionary
theories for the regression of mankind. His later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and
“Hyperion” show an increasing interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived
he would have established a closer contact with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of
escape. With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical
doctrine but for the expression of beauty. He aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake.

Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful according to the recognized standards.
He had deep insight to see beauty even in those things that are not thought beautiful by
ordinary people. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm:

“Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”

In Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and with Shelley on
the other. Keats was neither rebel nor utopian dreamer. Endowed with a purely artistic nature,
he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time, a position of almost
complete detacher. He knew nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of hostility of the existing order
of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s humanitarian and passion for reforming the
world. The famous opening line of “Endymion”, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ strikes
the keynote of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold and prosaic, he
habitually sought an imaginative escape from it. He loved nature just for its own sake and for
the glory and loveliness which he found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than
he was to the simple “poetry for earth” but there was nothing mystical in love and nature was
never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual message and meanings.

Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely
telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley
advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political
measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own
heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had
the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to
philosophy or politics.

Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that
distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty
and truth. His creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of
beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because
he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach.

Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural
solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied
Grecian Urn; a nightingale; the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid; the melancholy and
indolence of a poet; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring.
What he asked of poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him:

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,

What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret,
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”

“I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry” – the theme of both these poems
is that lovely things in nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and great aim of poet is to be a
friend to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man. Perhaps Keats would have said that he
attempted his nobler life of poetry in poems like “Lamia” and “Hyperion” but it is very
doubtful whether he believed that he had done justice to this elevated type of poetic creation.

Keats’ love of beauty is not ‘Platonic’ in nature. He loves physical objects and takes interest
in human body. He does not become obscene but his love of beauty gives us very attractive
and suggestive picture of women:

“Yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,
And so live ever.”

Religion for him took definite shape in the adoration of the beautiful, an adoration which he
developed into a doctrine. Beauty is the supreme truth. It is imagination that discovers
beauty. This idealism, assumes a note of mysticism. One can see a sustained allegory in
“Endymion” and certain passages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value. Sidney
Colvin says:

“It was not Keats aim merely to create a paradise of art and beauty discovered from the
cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but
of beauty whatever its element existed. His concept of poetry covered the whole range of
life and imagination.”

As he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his
conception of beauty. Fate did not give him time enough to fully unlock the ‘mysteries of the
heart’ and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of
human life.